The varied “flavours” of Social Media

Since throwing myself headfirst into the maelstrom that is social media, I’ve come to learn that not all social media platforms are actually “social”. I’ve also learned that each social media platform has it’s own “flavour” and not all of them are going to whet your appetite. In fact, some of them will leave you wondering “what the hell?” more times than you can count. In the past few months, I’ve tried all flavours of social media to boost traffic to my sites/blogs. Although that was always the primary goal, I’ve come to really enjoy some of these communities a lot more than I expected. Like all communities, there are rules to adhere to, some of them you may even break without even realising. Even though you’d think that the majority of these communities probably have a lot of the same people using them (which makes sense), the communities are very different in every way. Once you learn that, you’re off to a good start.

So I am now the proud owner of a Tumblr account, a Twitter account, an Instagram account, a Reddit account, a google plus/blogger account, a Pinterest account and of course, WordPress. I’ve had the most success with Pinterest (up to 92.2k views per month after being a member since April/May this year) and the fastest follower count on Instagram so far. I found Pinterest exceptionally easy to use and a great tool for gathering awareness of your product/blog etc and driving traffic. Instagram is the easiest to gain followers on, along with twitter. Pinterest is probably the strangest social media tool I’ve used simply because it doesn’t really work the same way that the others do. You would think that your first priority with any social media application is to engage your audience and gain as many followers as possible. Pinterest doesn’t really need for you to have a lot of followers to gain momentum or “brand awareness”, in fact, I only have a very small handful of followers but those followers are constantly repinning my content and therefore increasing the views and saves I get on each pin (post). The other fantastic thing about Pinterest is that you can gain a huge insight into audience demographics with their analytics tool (only available for Pinterest Business accounts). I read online that you should use Pinterest like you would a “search engine”. I’ve tried to apply that ever since and it’s working well. I’ve only just created a new Instagram account (yesterday, in fact) and I’ve already surpassed the accounts I am following in followers so I’ll definitely continue to use Instagram.

If I had to talk about one social media tool I just couldn’t “mesh” with its Google Plus+ and Blogger. I know a few WordPress bloggers use Blogger so I thought it would be a good fit for me. Well, no, I was entirely wrong about that! I’ve posted content on Google+ for a few months now and I’ve only managed to get a few +’s on content and zero followers. In fact, Google+ is easily the only social media tool that doesn’t adhere to what I call the “golden rule” of using social media tools. That rule is to post as much content as you can and boost it with articles/images/pictures of your own creation regularly. This formula has worked well for me on both Tumblr and Instagram.